They have to be recurring, since Zach Braff has vowed that he's done with the show, and Neil Flynn, John C. McGinley, and Donald Faison are all attached to new pilots, with Scrubs being a second option in case they're not picked up. Heck, even Lawrence is busy on the new Courteney Cox show Cougar Town.

I'm here, as one of the show's biggest fans, to beg ABC and Lawrence to let the show die. Please. It's the best thing they can do for it.

(S08E12) It's always fun when Scrubs takes its annual trip outside of J.D.'s head and lets us know what some of the other people around Sacred Heart are thinking. Considering we've heard from just about everyone else, it was nice to give the interns a chance in the spotlight. And, after last week's heartfelt but mostly laugh-free episode, it was good to see the show come back to the funny standard it had set for itself this year.

I'm starting to realize that if Bill Lawrence had actually taken the plunge and given us a spin-off featuring the interns, the character whose head we'd be in would be Denise / Jo. Yes, Jo's caustic. Yes, she's got about as much sympathy as a rock. But she seems to be the most well-developed character of all the interns, the one whose history we already know a little about and the one we know is ripe to go through a transformation over time. It doesn't hurt that Eliza Coupe a) does such a great job and b) is so darn nice to look at...

It looks like the remake of the television min-series V has cast its new evil alien leader, apparently named Anna. Former space-hooker Morena Baccarin (okay, she only played a space-hooker on the TV series Firefly) will be playing that particular role. She even bares a passing resemblance to Jane Badler, who originally played a similar role (when the character name was Diana) back in the 1980's.

Baccarin was great on Firefly. I loved the interplay between her and Nathan Fillion as Captain Reynolds. This just gives her something else to talk about when she goes around the sci fi convention circuit.

The Hollywood Reporter article also mentions a some other casting in the coming season, including Tony Hale (formerly of Arrested Development) in a new series called Cop House and Eliza Coupe an ABC remake of the British series No Heroics. So, of the three, Tony Hale is the only one not appearing in a remake. Good for him!

(S08E09) Looks like the final season cost-cutting didn't spare anyone, did it? This is the first episode in quite awhile -- if ever -- where we don't see Zach Braff on screen for even one second. We do hear him via Elliot's cell phone, but the writers wisely decided that, if J.D. wasn't going to be there in body, he wasn't going to be there in mind, either. In other words, this episode was fairly narration-free, and it was quite refreshing.

This has been a season of in-jokes and external observations about how each character deals with things around the hospital. Yes, we got the usual jokes about J.D. and how he goes off on his fantasies. But Carla and Elliot also got some of the business, and in Carla's case, it made for a well-done story.

(S08E02) As I mentioned in the review for "My Jerks" and my season eight preview, if you want to see a perfect example of what Scrubs has done so well over the years, look no further than this episode. It's a deft mix of comedy and drama, with emotion mingling with character-based jokes that move the story along instead of interfering with it. It's the kind of episode that makes people like me believe that the show has something left and buy into Bill Lawrence's suggestion that the show is going to get back to basics and keep the silliness to a minimum.

(S08E01) It's interesting how much attention Scrubs gets from us TV-loving types, considering how little attention it gets from everyone else. Why is it?

Well, partially it's because of Bill Lawrence and the cast, who have been entertaining to cover and very press-friendly. But mostly, it's because of the comedic potential the program showed over it's first couple of years, which included the ability to go from comedy to high drama in an instant and make it look easy.

The eighth(and final?) season premiere was more comedic than dramatic (the second episode of the night, "My Last Words," demonstrates this balance quite well), but it showed that Lawrence was serious when he told critics that he was going to dial down the silly and get back to what made people like the show to begin with.

A lot of people -- fans included -- wonder how Scrubs has managed to get to an eighth season. After all, things weren't breaking its way at the end of what was supposed to be its seventh and final season: the writers' strike truncated the season, its network (NBC) no longer wanted the show, and, though the writing quality had picked up by the time the seventh season was cut short, it had declined enough that even the show's most ardent fans were wondering if it was time to put the show out of its misery.

But thanks to the efforts of Bill Lawrence and ABC Studios, Scrubs does live on, this time on ABC. And, after viewing the first two episodes of the new season, I'm happy to say that going to an eighth season was worth it. Lawrence told me that he wanted to get back to the humor and storytelling basics of the early seasons, and the episodes I saw show evidence of that.

As I found out when I first spoke to Bill Lawrence last year, it doesn't take much to get the creator of Scrubs going. All it might take is a quick question and he'll go off on a monologue that is not only funny, but has a lot of good information as well.

That's what I got from him when I spoke to him earlier this week. Yes, we went over what happened with NBC after the writers' strike and how his show was able to make the shift to ABC. But, since he already spoke about that at length, we talked more about why NBC treated the show like it did, what creative shifts he's going to make to the show this year (expect to see less baby and relationship stuff this year, and more of the medical drama and comedy that got people hooked on the show). And, of course, he also dropped the mini-bombshell that I posted about earlier in the week, that there might be a ninth, "next generation" season of Scrubs.

I'll warn you right now, this is a long transcript, which is why we're splitting it into three parts. But it's got a lot of good information, and if you're patient, you'll find some interesting spoilers about what's going to happen next year on the show (production on eighth season should be wrapped up by August, according to Lawrence). So, buckle up and enjoy the ride...

Betsy Beutler is best known for her role as Joanie on the Black Donnellys. Eliza Coupe guest-starred on an episode of Flight of the Conchords and had a role on the prematurely canceled HBO series 12 Miles of Bad Road. Fans of MTV's Human Giant are already familiar with the comedic work of Aziz Ansari.